[mythtv-users] A few newbie type questions

[Malcolm Smith]

Nick,

I'm on NTL cable. My approach:

H/w - Asus pundit 2.4 Celery / 120GB H/D
Capture - 1 Hauppauge Analog BT878 card
        - 1 Nova T

I use the Nova T card to capture freeview - this causes virtually 0 usage of
CPU as it captures a MPEG 2 direct.

If the channel I want record / watch is cable then the method is: NTL
cable -> Svideo input of BT878. This captures via CPU compression. You  can
capture up to full DVB resolution dependent on your CPU power.

Unless you know someone in NTL that will give you a suitable capture card
there is no way to directly capture the digital stream from you cable. You
will therefore need to dedicate an NTL box to inputting into Myth. If you
only have one NTL box you cannot record from one channel and watch another.
You can get DVB-c cards but NTL don't want to support them.

You could input this stream into a PVR 250/350.

You also need an IR transmitter - see threads about building an Lirc, or see
www.redeye.co.uk for a ready to go alternative. This will allow channel
changing on the NTL box.

If you are picky about the quality and don't mind the range of channels on
freeview... go with the Nova-T I'd say it's better picture quality.

If you don't want reduced picture quality when watching TV, then you can
still watch "Normal" TV and use myth as a video recorder.

-malc-

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org
> [mailto:mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org]On Behalf Of Nick Gilbert
> Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 3:46 PM
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] A few newbie type questions
>
>
> > MythTv supports PAL settings, 16:9 PAL is 720x576 like a 4:3 signal,
> > your TV stretches it to be 16:9, but there aren't more pixels in it,
> > it's simply the geometry of the pixel that changes. So if all you
> > transmissions are 16:9 you can just feed the signal to your TV and let
> > the TV handle the anamorphic stretching.
>
> I think you're right, but the important thing is the signalling. If
> mythTV doesn't properly recognise the signal when it's recording, or
> output it when it's playing back, then it might output a widescreen
> broadcast without the signal. That would mean lots of manual switching
> or squashed pictures.
>
> > The former is true. It writes the compressed stream to disk and plays it
> > back from there to give you the possibility to pause and rewind the live
> > tv stream.
>
> Hmm... I'd actually rather it didn't do that. On TIVOs it seems to
> degrade the picture quality, and causes a delay when changing channel
> (or doing anything) if you're using an external tuner. I'd want it to
> work more like a normal video, except with more intelligence when it
> comes to recording, and to have no tapes :)
>
> Thanks for your replies
>
> Nick...
>
>